Consciousness as God...

The soul is in itself a most lovely and perfect image of God.

St. John of the Cross


To many, the statement "I am God" rings of blasphemy. God, according to conventional religion, is the supreme deity, the almighty eternal omniscient creator. How can any lowly human being claim that he or she is God?

When the fourteenth-century Christian priest and mystic Meister Eckhart preached that "God and I are One" he was brought before Pope John XXII and forced to "recant everything that he had falsely taught." Others suffered a worse fate. The tenth-century Islamic mystic al-Hallãj was crucified for using language that claimed an identity with God.

Yet when mystics say "I am God," or words to that effect, they are not talking of an individual person. Their inner explorations have revealed the true nature of the self, and it is this that they identify with God. They are claiming that the essence of self, the sense of "I am" without any personal attributes, is God.

The contemporary scholar and mystic Thomas Merton put it very clearly:

If I penetrate to the depths of my own existence and my own present reality, the indefinable am that is myself in its deepest roots, then through this deep center I pass into the infinite I am which is the very Name of the Almighty.

"I am" is one of the Hebrew names of God, Yahweh. Derived from the Hebrew YHWH, the unspeakable name of God, it is often translated as "I AM THAT I AM."

I am the infinite deep
In whom all the worlds appear to rise.
Beyond all form, forever still.
So am I

Ashtavakra Gita


Similar claims appear in Eastern traditions. The great Indian sage Sri Ramana Maharshi said:

"I am" is the name of God… God is none other than the Self.

In the twelfth century, Ibn-Al-Arabi, one of the most revered Sufi mystics, wrote:

If thou knowest thine own self, thou knowest God.

Shankara, the eight-century Indian saint, whose insights revitalized Hindu teachings, said of his own enlightenment:

I am Brahman… I dwell within all beings as the soul, the pure consciousness, the ground of all phenomena... In the days of my ignorance, I used to think of these as being separate from myself. Now I know that I am All.

This sheds new light on the Biblical injunction "Be still, and know that I am God." I do not believe it means:: "Stop fidgeting around and recognize that the person who is speaking to you is the almighty God of all creation." It makes much more sense as an encouragement to still the mind, and know, not as an intellectual understanding but as a direct realization, that the "I am" that is your essential self, the pure consciousness that lies behind all experience, is God.

This concept of God is not of a separate superior being, existing in some other realm, overlooking human affairs and loving or judging us according to our deeds. God is in each and every one of us, the most intimate and undeniable aspect of ourselves. God is the light of consciousness that shines in every mind.

I Am the Truth

Identifying God with the light of consciousness brings new meaning and significance to many traditional descriptions of God.

Whatever is taking place in my mind, whatever I may be thinking, believing, feeling or sensing, the one thing I cannot doubt is consciousness. Consciousness is my only absolute, unquestionable truth. If the faculty of consciousness is God, then God is the truth.

The same applies to other people. The only thing I do not doubt about you is that you are conscious and have your own interior world of experience. I can doubt your physical form–indeed, modern physics tells me there is nothing really there, no material thing, that is. All that I perceive of you is a projection in my mind. I can doubt what you say. I can doubt your thoughts and feelings. But I do not doubt that "in there" is another conscious being like myself.

Like God, consciousness is omnipresent. Whatever our experience, consciousness is always there. It is eternal, everlasting.

When I say "I am," I do not mean a separate entity with a body as its nucleus. I mean the totality of being, the ocean of consciousness, the entire universe of all that is and knows.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj


God is omniscient, all-knowing. So too, consciousness is the essence and source of all our knowing. It lies behind all understanding.

God is the creator. Everything in our world, everything we see, hear, taste, smell, and touch; every thought, feeling, fantasy, intimation, hope, and fear; it is all a form that consciousness has taken on. Everything has been created in consciousness from consciousness. I, the light of consciousness, am the creator.

I am the God of my universe. And you are the God of yours.

God is Almighty. What greater power is there than the power of consciousness to appear as the myriad of forms we experience, everything in the world we see, hear, taste. touch and smell.

This pure Mind, the source of everything,
Shines forever and on all with the brilliance of its own perfection.
But the people of the world do not awake to it,
Regarding only that which sees, hears, feels and knows as mind,
Blinded by their own sight, hearing, feeling and knowing,
They do not perceive the spectral brilliance of the source of all substance.

Huang Po


The Materialist Mindset

Not only do traditional descriptions of God make new sense when God is identified with the faculty of consciousness, so do many spiritual practices. The key is the way we create of our personal reality.

In earlier chapters, we considered our construction of reality in terms of our sensory perception–the sounds, colors, and sensations we experience. The way in which we produce this picture of the world is more or less hard-wired into the brain. How we interpret this picture, however, varies considerably. You and I may assess a person’s actions in very different ways. We may read very different meanings into a news story, or see a situation at work in very different lights. These varying interpretations stem from the beliefs, assumptions and expectations we bring to the situation–what psychologists call our mind sets.

In much the same way as our various scientific paradigms are founded on an even more fundamental belief, or metaparadigm, the various assumptions that determine the meaning we give to our experience are based on a more fundamental mindset. We believe that inner peace and fulfillment comes from what we have or do in the external world.

Tragically, this way of thinking actually prevents us finding true peace of mind. We can become so busy worrying about whether or not we may be at peace in the future, or so busy being angry or resentful about what has stood in the way of peace in the past, we never have the chance to be at peace in the present...............Peterrussel.com